


Nyota is Swahili for Stars

by sarkany



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, nyota is a badass who deserved more screen time, women of starfleet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 02:32:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5850553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarkany/pseuds/sarkany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She sits in the front row because the professor is gorgeous and she loves languages even more than her new city.  Professor Spock speaks flawless Standard, despite being raised Vulcan, and has published more papers than years he's been in school. </p><p>But then again, his mom is Amanda Grayson, who is an impressive linguist, teacher, scientist, programmer herseld…she might have looked him up and then fallen promptly in love with his mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nyota is Swahili for Stars

**Author's Note:**

> This is the Nyota Academy era fic that nobody asked for but I wanted to write

Nyota comes from a family of empaths. She spent her childhood watching for tells and the subtlest inflections to make up for what everybody else automatically sensed. People tend to assume that empaths are more expressive, but mostly her family doesn’t need to rely on facial or tonal cues, so they don’t use them. Her aunts and sisters sometimes appear almost Vulcan in their blankness, but their impassivity belies their deep emotions. Just because they don’t show it doesn’t mean they feel any less.

Irritation is not a raised voice or the bright tumbling of sharp words, but the slightest narrowing of her sister’s eyes. Sometimes, she’ll miss cues, and it isn’t until someone else flinches that she realizes that they are picking up on what she cannot. So she spends more time watching, until the flicker of emotions that ripple through the superficial muscles of the face and into the placement of the arms becomes second nature to her.

When her bones start to elongate and grow skyward, she can keep up with the best of empaths and read the poor psi-null humans as if they had highlighted their feelings in flashing neon.

Which is why Kirk alarms and baffles her in equal measure.

That night at the bar, she had dismissed him readily, just another country hick hoping to score with the glamorous foreigner. Usually, these people don’t bother her. She brushes them off because they can’t help but want to grasp at a bigger world. But this one is snake-oil false in a way that rankles her. When he leaned his heavy, drunk weight against her, she had shoved him off with brisk efficiency and disgust, only allowing herself a brief flicker of pity when Ensign Giotto and co. begin a truly insipid bullying routine.

Later, she tells herself that she had already been half a liter into a truly spectacular local brew, not enough to completely strip her of reason, but enough to make the flashing lights soft around the edges. She had nursed a pleasant buzz behind her eyes on her way out and ignored the incongruities of the hick’s expression. After Pike stepped in and prevented Giotto from turning Kirk into an uneducated smear against the grotty floor, she left, satisfied that a murder hadn’t happened on her account and more than ready to start fresh in San Fran.

**

Although Nyota is the child of pounding sun and long stretches of scrubland, she loves the city with a passion that surprises her. If her home encapsulates tradition, then San Fran is progress, gleefully bounding into the present, brilliant with suppressed enthusiasm.

Her new roommate is Orion, and after the initial awkwardness where Gaila stared at the edge of a trailing tattoo and she stared at the faded remnants of scars, they fell easily into the push-pull of sisterly camaraderie. 

The first day of her Advanced Xenolinguistics class, she doesn’t register the blond slouched near the back. She sits in the front row because the professor is gorgeous and she loves languages even more than her new city. Professor Spock speaks flawless Standard, despite being raised Vulcan (Vulcans are xenophobic assholes, for all their preachy pacifistic _infinite diversity in infinite combinations_ shtick. Anyone with a working brain and access to their standardized educational schedules can see that. Standard isn’t taught until age eight, two years after the critical period ends for Vulcans. But then again, his mom is Amanda Grayson, who is an impressive linguist, teacher, scientist, programmer…she might have looked him up and then fallen promptly in love with his mother.)

It’s not until Professor Spock is halfway through the lecture about expectations and future coursework that some asshole interrupts, “Spock, as enlightening as this has all been, I feel kind of cheated that you’re implying all sorts of things not on the syllabus. Or stated in the prereqs for this course.”

She slews around to see the grinning face of The Hick.

“If you feel inadequately prepared, Cadet,“ comes the smooth unruffled response behind her, “then you are free to drop the course and take a class more suited to your academic ability.”

“Not at all,” the hick isn’t even fazed, instead nudging the scowling man beside him, “It’s just that some of us haven’t taken about the fifty languages that aren’t prerequisite to this course.”

The professor makes an almost inaudible spurious noise at the back of his throat, but continues implacably, “That is a private matter to be discussed between the cadet and myself during office hours, and not during the shared class time of your peers. To continue, you will be expected to write and defend…”

Nyota turns back around, but not before the hick catches her eye and grins salaciously. A minute later, a message pops up onto her padd.

 _Heyy xenolinguisitcs, happy to c u here, wanna hookup? ;) ~jim_ It takes her a second to parse the dialect (terran textual informal, which was largely predominant in 21st century in the western Anglosphere among _pubescents_ of all things. She has a moment of pure bafflement because even if Standard is mostly based on English, this dialect is obscure, imprecise, and heavily dependent upon the interpretive skills of the listener). But when she does, she almost gives the bastard the satisfaction of committing homicide on her first day of class. Instead, she steadfastly ignores the flashing red light for the rest of the lecture.

Nevermind that she never gave him her padd ID, first name, or any identifying information beyond her field of study. 

_**_

That night, she has Gaila hack the mainframe Academic records and exhales in shock. For all that he is the embodiment of the average country redneck, James Tiberius Kirk might actually be better with languages than her. 

She scrolls past the discouragingly long list of classes he tested out of, the equally discouraging list of classes he’s currently taking, and then spends a long time staring at the face of Kirk, George [father, deceased] and Kirk, Winona [mother, active service USS Potemkin, personnel file 345903245-IITC-Blue]. 

Everybody, even a girl living in a traditionalist matriarchal culture that disapproved of globalization, had heard of the Kelvin Disaster. There have been three holovid adaptations, an interactive RPG game, annual broadcasts of the Kirk family stoically visiting the Wall, and too many actions figures to count (one of which she possibly might own. Not that she’s going to admit that ever. Jim Kirk would likely lord that over her until the day she died.) 

Gaila peers over her shoulder and quirks an eyebrow at her. 

She pushes her shock and pity aside, “Nothing, just curious about an asshole I could not believe tested into my languages class.” 

Gaila laughs, “Kirk, right? I had the same reaction when I saw him in my progamming class.” 

_**_

Jim Kirk is an asshole and a misogynistic prick, albeit a freakishly intelligent one. He also apparently has an inexhaustible sexual appetite and enough sexual appeal to cross almost all interspecies cultural differences. 

By the first week, she learns that he has yet to spend a single night by himself or with the same person. By the first month, Gaila creates a special spreadsheet detailing their respective sexual conquests. The spreadsheet is colour-coded, three dimensional, and scary. Nobody could sleep with that many people while taking Kirk’s courseload and still survive. Maybe a Vulcan (and her Linguistics professor is delicious), but everybody knows that Vulcan’s don’t have sex. Nyota isn’t 100% sure where baby Vulcans come from, but suspects that it involves storks and a lot of impassive staring contests. 

Two days later, Gaila determinedly drags Nyota to the canteen, a look of such furious concentration on her face that students and professors alike leap out of her way. Nyota mentally begins composing apologies to the Academy; the last time Gaila wore this expression, they both had the spend days scrubbing various flavours of lubricant out of the simulation room upholstery. 

Gaila makes a beeline for a table crowded near the back of the room. 

“You!” she hisses, stabbing a finger viciously at Kirk, who freezes mid-gesture at his perpetually dour-faced friend. Kirk freezes, checks out her cleavage, and blinks uncertainly. Beside him, his friend groans into his hands. 

“Dammit Jim, if she has some vendetta against you for sleeping with her man, or with her sister, or her mother, I ain’t patching you up again, you hear me?” 

Kirk ignores him and makes a placating gesture at Gaila, “Ignore him, he’s just short on sleep-“ 

“Because some damned fool thought he knew better than a licensed medical professional. Tentacles are not supposed to go there!” 

There is a moment of silence as both Gaila and Nyota process this. There is only one person on campus with tentacles. 

Gaila gasps out, “You slept with professor Skth*****?” 

Kirk says, “In my defense, I was drunk. Very drunk. Blackout drunk.” He blinks appeasingly up at them. His eyes are startlingly blue, cerulean almost. 

Nyota can only gape at him. Gaila, on the other hand, looks vaguely impressed. “I haven’t been able to get any professors yet,” she admits and moves to sit opposite Kirk. 

“Ah,” he says, “Do I know you?” 

“Gaila,” Gaila sings, “this is going to be a wonderful friendship built upon sex. You are Jim Kirk, and this is my sister-friend N-“ 

“Uhura,” she interrupts because she empathetically is not giving Kirk the pleasure of her first name. 

He smiles lecherously at both of them, before laughing brightly. Nyota sighs and sits down, because even after a month of sly innuendo and inappropriate propositions, he has yet to drop his voice and make the bedroom eyes at her like he’s currently directing at Gaila. 

_*_

Nyota never understood the average male Terran’s penchant for feminizing their vehicles. Sure, bikes, cars, boats, planes are all _ridden _and there’s something undeniably lustful about a powerful machine thrumming alive beneath her, but it’s weirdly anthropomorphic (all jibes about farm animals aside) and feels just a bit dehumanizing.__

That being said, Kirk’s bike is a wet dream on wheels. She may have agreed to tutor Kirk in regional dialects of Andorian in exchange for his keychip at least once a week. Although from what she hears, Kirk usually manages to wheedle himself into being taught various bits of miscellaneous skills in exchange for sexual services. It’s not quite prostitution, but she thinks that he could benefit from a psychiatrist or three. And several anti-STD hypos. (Not that she’s judging, but statistically speaking, he has to have picked up at least a few at this point, and nobody with a course load like his would be throwing himself at that many people without a few demons.) 

Kirk’s not a bad sort, even if he’s an utter bastard with no class. 

**Author's Note:**

> I actually don't know where I'm going with this, except that I think Nyota is a complex character with a complex history and that she's someone worth examining in greater detail.
> 
> Please, comment and let me know what you liked, what you hated, what made you laugh, what seemed out of character. Constructive criticism is treasured and cuddled. (Praise is printed out and framed on my wall.)


End file.
